Twitter Drops 140-Character Limit for Direct Messages

Twitter has just announced a potentially game-changing move to ditch the 140 character limit for direct messages.

By Simon Smith |
Aug 13, 2015

The private face of Twitter distances itself from itscondensed and more popular public side, as itofficially wipes out the 140-character limit from its direct messaging feature.

The change comes after an announcement made in June 2015, deviatingfrom the popular social networking site's short 140-character restriction for its public posts or "tweets," according to a report from Tech Crunch.

Aside from the unfenced character limit for DMs, Twitter also rolled out other messaging-related changes recently, such as a new Direct Message button on users' profile pages which is available for iOs and Android devices, and the ability to receive and create direct messages from anyone on Twitter.

The change in Twitter's DMs has already been carried out for Android, Apple, Twitter.com, Tweetdeck, and Twitter for Mac, however, direct messaging will still be bound by the 140-character limit for those getting and creating DMs via SMS.

Though changes have been developed and have been implemented for direct messages, Twitter assures its 500-million-and-growing number of users that it will not be adopting any changes for tweets.

"Tweets will continue to be the 140 characters they are today, rich with commentary as well as photos, videos, links, Vines, gifs, and emoji," wrote Sachin Agarwal, Twitter's Product Manager, on his recent blog post.

The move to make DMs limitless may be Twitter's response to other popular messaging platforms, such as iMessage, Messenger, Whatsapp, and Viber, among many others, which do not have character limitations for messages.

Twitter is a social networking site created in 2006. Its main office is in San Francisco, USA.

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